GATEMOUTH BROWN

Following His Own Road

Brown is content to live out his days performing and spending time at home near the alligator-filled swamps outside Slidell, La. When he isn’t watching the History Channel, Animal Planet or cartoon oldies such as Tom & Jerry, he’s cruising in one of six beloved mint-condition vintage cars, including a 1976 Buick Riviera and a 1964 Lincoln Continental.

Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, perhaps the most versatile of all blues-based musicians, died Saturday at age eighty-one of complications from lung cancer and heart disease. A longtime resident of Slidell, Louisiana, just outside New Orleans, the Blues Foundation Hall of Famer recently lost his home to Hurricane Katrina and had been preparing to relocate to Austin.
A multi-instrumentalist who played fiddle, mandolin, viola, drums, piano and harmonica in addition to guitar, Brown was a master of many genres: big-band blues, bop, country, Cajun, even calypso — what he called “American Music, Texas Style.” A youthful disciple of T-Bone Walker, Brown’s own ferocious, exceedingly confident style would inspire a wide cross-section of followers, from Albert Collins and Johnny Copeland to Stevie Ray Vaughn and Frank Zappa. “I’m so unorthodox,” he once said, “a lot of people can’t handle it.”
Brown was born April 18, 1924, in Vinton, Louisiana, and raised from infancy in Orange, Texas. He learned to play fiddle and guitar through his father, a railroad man and moonlighting musician who specialized in country and Cajun music. Brown earned his nickname in high school when a teacher accused him of having a “voice like a gate”; a brother, James “Widemouth” Brown, later had a brief recording career of his own. Brown played drums in a touring band before joining the Army. After the service, he found work as a guitar player in San Antonio and was soon brought to Houston by the nightclub owner Don Robey. As blues legend has it, Brown made $600 in tips in one night in 1947 at Robey’s club, the Peacock, while filling in for an ailing Walker.
During his long career, Brown was awarded several W.C. Handy honors as an instrumentalist, and he was a recipient of the Rhythm & Blues Foundation’s Pioneer Award and NARAS’ Heroes Award. In 1982 he won a Grammy for Alright Again!, a Rounder recording that featured covers of songs by T-Bone Walker and Albert Collins. A stint with Alligator Records yielded a duet with Michelle Shocked in 1992, and Verve paired Brown with a procession of admirers, including Eric Clapton, Ry Cooder and Leon Russell, for the 1996 duets album A Long Way Home. Brown’s last album, Timeless, was released a year ago on the Hightone label.

Gatemouth Brown Dies
Influential blues instrumentalist was eighty-one source:Rolling Stone Sept. 12,2005

Bookmark the permalink.

About grnarrow

Setlist Architect/Art Scene Checker-Outer/Sound Feeler

Leave a Reply